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Rating: Album by album, track by track, story after story. Departures, reunions, migrating lives, but always and only one common denominator: music in its purest or most impure form.
The Level 42 were born from the essential prism of Mark King and Phil Gould. Multi-instrumentalists with ease, instrument cannibals. The former makes the bass a prima donna, the Rosetta Stone of a pop that incorporates jazz funk and pop without really violating any of the fields.
The keystone is identity: you recognize King’s bass and Gould’s drums from a hint, a chord, a beat, and uplift.
So, around 1979: King on bass, Phil Gould on drums, his brother Boon on guitar, Mike Lindup on keyboards, Wally Badarou (never on stage, always behind the scenes) on keyboards.
Difficult to label a neurotic sound that develops the unfolding of melodies on bass and drums.
For the five, composing comes easy, comes spontaneously. The Gould brothers churn out lyrics telling their own baggage of experiences and general culture, in the recording studio every instrument finds space by accepting the rhythm of the two mentioned above with echoes, sporadic initiatives, and the corollary of voices bouncing from King to Lindup with a tacit and never discussed preferential path for the former.
The skill and fluidity of the members will over time attract the attention and collaboration of first-rate musicians: above all the virtuoso Allan Holdsworth but also Jakko Jaszyk Gary Husband and Alan Murphy (the latter will die in 1989, exhausted by AIDS symptoms, after enriching the album 'Staring At The Sun').
A live machine of all respect, Level 42 has strung together a heterogeneous catalog ranging from the brisk, aggressive, and methodical sound of the first six albums to the commercial bend that takes shape starting in 1986 with the album that consecrates them, 'Running In The Family'. An honest work but one that doesn't have the personality and arrogance of the early works. And indeed it is here that the Gould brothers, partly due to pure disagreement and partly due to frayed nerves, abandon the ship, coincidentally the last video we see them in is that of 'It's Over'.
The cord will never be completely cut, the two will continue to contribute to the project even at a distance with the lyrics, and Phil will even attempt a reunion in 1994 for the 'Forever Now' project, but will leave again just before the tour, telling RCA where to go in those years when it had eyes and time only for Take That.
This handbook-guide is meticulously immersed in the world of Level 42, dissecting each track, each b-side, body, soul, and every kind of facet. Also present and accounted for are the two first solo works by King and Lindup, 'Influences' and 'Changes'.
As I write, the band, discographically inactive since the 2013 EP 'Sirens', continues to do what it was conceived for: playing.
The concerts, the tours, are countless. From the original core, Mark and Mike remain, accompanied by top-notch session musicians.
Boon left us in 2020, struck down by a heart attack.
I heard from Phil a couple of years ago on Twitter, where he dabbles as a news columnist but always responds to fans and the curious.
He was in Italy, I advised him to stock up on wines, he asked me where he could find top-quality peppers for which he is crazy, I replied that if he passes through Carmagnola he can't go wrong.
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